Bloodkin (Jaseth of Jaelshead) Read online

  More of them turned to look, and one of them cried happily “An’ ‘e got ‘is kid!” to which followed some cheering, much to my confusion. Suddenly a huge beast of a man appeared from under the bar.

  “Charlie? What the hell! Why didn’t that damned boy tell me?” He strode out from behind the bar to clasp Charlie by the arm. “Ah, my Nea’thi brother, welcome back!”

  Myr Rudi wasn’t nearly as tall as Charlie, or even me, but was so wide across the shoulders he seemed almost square. He had an explosive mop of salt-and-pepper hair cut unevenly across his shoulders and his nose was reddened from years of landlordship.

  “And here’s our young lordling, Jaseth of Jaelshead I presume?” We were still in the Jaelshead region so I guess that made my father his Lord too. I shuffled a bit, embarrassed, and held out my hand, but Rudi brushed it aside and hugged me by the shoulders.

  “None of that, boyo. You’re Nea’thi-Blood, you’re different.” He raised his voice. “And any friend of Charlie’s is a friend of mine!” Chuckling away he led Charlie and me to some slightly threadbare couches by the fire. “I met another one of you lot just the other day, would you believe? A Nea’thi-Blood that is, with his Mentor of course, a Thomas someone – serious sort of chap. From out your way as well. Belgath? Talgeth? Something like that anyway, good Jaelshead name. Bright orange hair. Only stopped for lunch, but they were on their way to Lille, I expect you’ll meet them there.”

  The musician had finished her song and was glowering at us as Rudi chatted away while settling us in, plumping cushions and rearranging side tables so they were well within reach.

  “Come on girl, play something good for our visitors, something we all know!” He sighed dramatically as she shook her head and began to play again. “Might as well be doing what I pay her for,” Rudi muttered. He smiled apologetically at Charlie. “She just turned twenty-seven you see, and hasn’t quite gotten over the fact she’ll never be a Queen.”

  Charlie nodded sagely, still looking at the girl. “Well, it is a difficult job. But for those who are not selected there are a million other things I’m sure they would be suitable for. Like, uh, music!” Charlie turned to Rudi with a beatific smile on his face. The girl fumbled a chord but ploughed on grimly. I snorted at Charlie’s apparent irony but he looked at me severely. “Perseverance is a wonderful trait in Humans, and should be encouraged.” I hung my head, suitably admonished, but he went on, more gently this time. “But often Humans seem not to realise what they are and what they are not.” He glanced at the podium and shrugged his shoulders, smiling apologetically.

  Rudi had bustled away and now returned with a bottle of a local Pinot Noir, glasses and two plates full of huge steaming wedges of meat pie. “There you go boys, fresh venison pie, with the last of the summer plums and a bottle of the best red Jaelshead has to offer!”

  “Would you believe he’s only ten years older than me?” whispered Charlie, reaching for his utensils when Rudi shuffled back to the bar. “Man, I’m starved!” and he tucked into his pie with enormous gusto, discouraging further discussion. I was a bit shocked; Rudi must have been almost sixty years old! I realised belatedly that I had never asked Charlie his age. It had become apparent in the few short days I had known him that he was still very young, mid-twenties at the latest. And I knew that the Nea’thi had a significantly longer life-span than Humans, but Charlie being fifty? That would make him older than my own father! Grimacing at how completely different the two men were, I reached for the wine bottle and was shocked again. The “best red Jaelshead has to offer” turned out to be from a vineyard I had overheard terrible reports about, and from the last years’ vintage, no less!

  Charlie noticed me frowning at the bottle and laughed, his mouth full of pie. “Playing wine snob, are we JJ?” He seemed to have a new nickname for me every day, and mostly it felt pretty cool that Charlie would bother, but this time it rankled. Seriously? This was the best they could do? I had to admit, I felt a bit insulted.

  As if reading my mind, Charlie swallowed his pie and took the bottle from me, pouring two large glasses. “Don’t be insulted kiddo, this probably is the best they’ve got.” He took a big gulp and one of his eyes twitched at the taste, but he managed to smile and go on. “Not everyone can afford to have their cellars stocked with the actual best.”

  Bah, I felt stupid again. Growing up in a fancy house with fancy food and fancy wine, I was just a silly lordling with no idea how real people lived.

  But Charlie just laughed when he saw my face. “It’s okay! This is different to what you’re used to, but don’t feel bad about it!” He took another swig. “And it’s not that bad, once you get over the initial, uh, sting.” And he was actually right. Washing down mouthfuls of the bloody good pie, by the time it came to refill my glass I was almost enjoying it.

  When we had finished eating, a group of locals wandered over and greeted Charlie with such familiarity that I was beginning to wonder how often he stayed here.

  “That one night that you were here last, Charlie, me old boy!” exclaimed a farmer, answering my unspoken question. “Oof, I was hungover something rotten the next day!” The others laughed in agreement. “My missus was awfully unkind!”

  Charlie introduced the others as Tolliseth, Sergeth, Markus and Granth, who had been speaking, and he turned back to Granth. “You know, you should bring your dear lady-wife here with you sometimes, it’s not fair that we lads get to have all the fun!”

  Granth snorted but nodded. “Well, yeah, I s’pose that’d be nice. But there’s the kids at home…” He trailed off as Charlie frowned at him.

  “Come on, that’s easy! Get all the kids together and let the older ones take charge, then they can spend the evening playing while you adults have a proper night out.” He shrugged modestly. “Hey, you might even get some dancing going…” he glanced at the podium where the girl with the guitar was struggling through a rather mournful ballad. “This is if, of course, you can get our proficient entertainer to play something more cheerful!” The men cracked into laughter and the rather solemn mood was broken.

  The youngest of the men, Tolliseth if I remembered, leaned in, “Charlie? I did that thing that you said.”

  “And?” Charlie smiled in anticipation.

  “Worked like a bloody charm!” He turned and showed off a group of small round bruises on his neck. The men cheered and Charlie clapped happily.

  “See? I told you it would work! Women love the big romantic gestures, mad as it may seem to us poor menfolk.” He sighed dramatically, to much hilarity.

  “How do you know all this stuff?” asked the stout Markus.

  Charlie grinned at his captive audience. “Well, of course young Nea’thi study Human behaviour and psychology in depth. And that’s before we’re even allowed to leave the Enclaves!” Someone whistled and a few others muttered “of course!” as if they knew exactly what Charlie was talking about. He had attracted a bit of an audience at this point, and I suddenly felt like a total git, sitting there beside him, realising I knew pretty much nothing about Charlie’s early life, his education (though I had talked at length about my own tutors and how I hated not being able to go to a real school), even his parents. I listened more closely to his story.

  “So we Nea’thi kids spend thirty years at school in the Enclaves.” The audience made noises of confusion, “Our cities. Underground.” Then there were nods of understanding. “Then, if we qualify, and most everyone does, we become Journeymen and we live Outside for ten years, learning about life and thinking about what we want to do.” There was some shaking of heads and nervous laughter as the audience were slightly awed by the Nea’thi timeline. Ten years spent wandering around? Just living? Unbelievable!

  “Then we get to choose our profession and we go back to the Enclaves to study.” He coughed. “Well, you can go back to study whenever you like, but ten years is the minimum before they’ll let you into most professions. So anyway, I decided I wanted to be a Mentor, so I went b
ack to Ұiờ, studied for ten years and now here I am, with my very first Bloodkin.” He raised his glass “Jaseth of Jaelshead!” and he downed it to cheers and calls to Rudi for more wine.

  First! Hell, this night was full of surprises. I had no idea I was Charlie’s first Mentoring job, no wonder he seemed so young! I realised the crowd was looking at me expectantly so I stood and held up my glass to Charlie, clearing my throat and feeling like a bloody superstar.

  “Well, here’s to Charlie, thanks for letting me take your Mentoring cherry!” The room exploded with laughter and cheering and Charlie stood to clink his glass against mine. He punched gently me in the arm.

  “Cheers Jas, you’re a good kid.” He hooted with mirth, “Man, we are going to have the best time!”

  Much later in the evening, when the crowd had dispersed to their rooms and their homes, Charlie and I had moved to one of the booths closest to the fire, that was now little more than glowing embers. Only a small party of drunken merchants remained, and Myr Rudi was wiping down the bar with his usual energy.

  Charlie had delighted the crowd with stories from his years as a Journeyman, and answered the barrage of questions about life in the Enclaves, the royal court and inevitably Hầұeӣ, which the locals insisted on calling magic.

  “Of course it’s real,” he answered more genially than I thought the impudent question, from one of the merchants who had pulled up a chair, deserved. “What, you thought we made it up?”

  He had demurred though, when asked for a demonstration. “We are taught that we mustn’t use our, er, magic for frivolous purposes. It’s special, and we only use it when we really need to,” he admonished the crowd, but then grinned, to lighten the mood. “And it takes rather a lot of concentration, and with all this fine Jaelshead red our Myr Rudi has been plying me with, I’m too far gone to even think about it!” There had been much laughter at this and Granth was dispensed to the bar to gather more bottles for the happy group.

  Charlie had even gone over to the girl on the podium and whispered something in her ear, something that elicited a smile which lit her pinched face. As he strolled back to the couch she straightened and tucked her lank hair behind her ears and launched into a stomping tune that soon had almost the entire inn singing along. When I asked him what on earth he had said to her, he just grinned and shrugged his shoulders.

  “I just told her how much we were enjoying her wonderful musicianship, and I suggested a couple of my favourites that I could just tell would sound great if she sung them.” I had laughed at his ridiculous flattery. “What? You just have to know how to appeal to Humans. And if you tell someone enough that they are great, then they will be great. And look at her now!”

  If he was being a bit heavy-handed with the life lessons, I figured it was his job – his new job, no less – and to be fair, I couldn’t argue with his logic. The girl was standing now, one foot resting on the crossbars of the stool, her guitar balanced on her upraised knee, belting out a tune that everyone except me seemed to know the words to.

  Gina!

  I love my Gina!

  I love her, yeah yeah

  When she gives me that stuff

  I just drink it all up

  I love it when she gives me

  Her wonderful love

  Gina!

  When she finished she bowed at the hearty applause, grinning with pleasure. I saw one of the other young locals, Sergeth I think, stand and fill a glass with wine which he took and offered to her with a shy smile. Charlie noticed it too and turned to grin at me, both thumbs up.

  “Well, that’s my good deed for the evening.” He chuckled conspiratorially, then sighed. “Might make up for some of the disappointment in not being selected.”

  By then the crowd, which included more of the travelling merchants by this stage, had noted the lull in the music and were once again clamouring for Charlie’s attention. He told stories and joked and laughed until the wee hours of the morning, when, overcome by exhaustion and wine, the crowd dispersed and we retired gratefully to bed.

  I awoke in unfamiliar surroundings to Charlie wrenching open curtains, flooding the room with indecently bright light. The bed, which had seemed so soft and inviting when we finally stumbled to our rooms the night before, now seemed hard as rocks, and my neck and shoulders were painfully stuff. I felt like someone had carved open my stomach and rearranged my insides. I groaned, utterly miserable.

  But Charlie seemed as bright and cheerful as ever as he unlatched the window and pushed it open. I could have punched him.

  “Got any sweet Nea’thi magic stuff to make me feel better? I think I’m a bit hungover.”

  “Hầұeӣ” Charlie corrected before laughing. “Nope! Well, I do, but I’ve got something even better.” He rummaged through his saddlebags then gestured to the door to out adjoining bathroom. “Go get yourself cleaned up and I’ll see what I can do.” I didn’t think anything, save hours of blessed unconsciousness, could make me feel better. I hauled myself out of bed and into my discarded clothes.

  “I’m never drinking again,” I muttered, fumbling with the bathroom door.

  Charlie laughed, obnoxiously loud. “We’ll see, kiddo!”

  After relieving my roiling guts I rinsed my face with the cold water in the washbasin and scrubbed out my mouth with the minty paste Charlie swore by. Feeling only slightly less nauseas I went back into the bedroom to find Charlie seated by the window, a curious contraption in his hand. It was a wooden pipe of sorts, a long tube curved delicately away from the large bowl, filled with what looked like dried moss.

  “A moss pipe” Charlie said proudly, holding it out to me. “See, us Nea’thi only discovered the joys of drinking after the Leaving. Not much to ferment, living Underground. But this stuff,” he gestured to a collection of small leather pouches of different colours that he had arranged on the end of the bed, “Hell, we’ve been smoking this for 50,000 years!” I sniffed at the moss in the pipe, it was sweet and grassy and smelt of cloves, or maybe cinnamon. Charlie giggled as I wrinkled my nose. “Our horticulturalists take great pride in the quality of our moss. We’ve developed a number of different varieties from the original psychoactive wild moss we discovered when we went Underground.” He held up the white leather pouch. “This is a very weak variety, developed to alleviate head and body pains, nausea, and to restore appetite while still allowing for clear mental function. A perfect hangover cure!”

  Sweet Lilbecz, why hadn’t I known about this stuff? It could have saved me a lot of grief on the hideous mornings with my tutors after nights when boredom had induced me to filtch a bottle or two from the Manor’s cellars.

  Charlie laughed, as if reading my thoughts. “I have noticed that Humans tend to be a bit wary of Nea’thi customs, especially the further away from the Capitols you get.” He shrugged apologetically at the inference that I was a bit, well, rural.

  “What are the others for?” I asked, pointed to the other small bags.

  “Oh well, this one?” He held the green bag. “That’s a new variety. Well, new in that it was developed after the Leaving. This is for when you’re drinking alcohol and you don’t want to get drunk.”

  “Would have been helpful last night,” I growled.

  “Ha! Well, it was a Saturday night after all, and after three days of hard travelling I thought we deserved to get a little drunk.”

  “A little!”

  More laughter. He held up the blue pouch. “This one is to aid sleeping.” He pointed to the gold one. “That one is to help you stay awake. The Red is for when want to party, it makes you laugh and laugh.” I rubbed my eyes in exhaustion at the thought of Charlie laughing any more than he already did. He noticed this and giggled. “And the Purple is for, uh, sexy times.” He blushed, which looked odd on his grey face.

  “What’s that one for?” I pointed to the last pouch, which was black leather embroidered with a delicate silver thread.

  Charlie hesitated. “That one is the strongest one. Extr
emely psychoactive. It’s used in certain educational rituals and only under close supervision.” He laughed nervously at my interest. “Don’t even think about it Jaseth! When you’re ready we will partake, it’s part of the Graduation from the Academy, it helps you access your Hầұeӣ. But only when you’re ready! If you smoke it in the wrong emotional state, or without proper supervision you can go insane! Or find yourself three days later, wandering strange forests with your feet cut to ribbons. Or worse.” His face clouded as if he remembered something painful, but he shook himself a little and went on. “So we’ll stick to the White for the meantime, yeah?”

  I looked around for a sparklight or some matches, keen to see if this anti-nausea moss would actually help. I really was on the verge of throwing up.

  “Here, pop this end in your gob,” and I complied as Charlie squinted slightly at the bowl end. There was a little pop of smoke from the moss and I inhaled far too much in my surprise. The smoke was sweet, yes, and really more a vapour than smoke, but the blast of hot fumes on the back of my throat made my eyes water and then I was coughing furiously. Charlie thumped me on the back vigorously, chuckling away.

  “Easy on, kiddo. Slow and steady wins the race!”